When designing any technology intervention, I try and incorporate the following skills from the graduate profile:

• Develop an understanding and appreciation of current issues and debates in the field;
• Develop the capacity to locate, evaluate and use the information effectively;
• Make appropriate use of advanced information and communication technologies; and
• Work independently and in collaboration with others.

With the rise of Web 2.0 (social technologies), it becomes essential for teachers to scaffold collaborative learning mediated through technologies in relevant contexts. This provides students with (1) an experience of the collaborative process online, including familiarity with the technology e.g. wiki, (2) exposure to etiquette online (netiquette) and (3) awareness of the challenges that influence good collaboration and the quality of the output e.g. copyright.

There has been quite a lot of research on digital literacy with subsequent categorisation of users based on age e.g. digital natives and immigrants (Prensky, 2001). If based purely on age, which I personally don’t see as a reasonable qualifier of digital literacy, my students are mostly digital immigrants. More recent studies such as Kennedy et al. (2007) contest this categorisation and the assumption that digital natives have the necessary transferable technical skills gained through interaction with social media. Therefore, in undergraduate learning design projects and my own teaching, I try and scaffold the process quite a lot. Given below are two examples from a postgraduate course that I teach and an undergraduate course, for which I designed a collaborative assignment.

Example 1: Postgraduate course in eLearning

Students are required to research and write an online report on technologies on the horizon. Though a group task, students are expected to commit to individual research and then collaboratively contribute to the writing of the report using a wiki. I introduce them to the wiki platform and given clear guidelines on the type and format of the report which is based on the horizon reports. They have the freedom to explore further and negotiate different roles within their group. Some of the challenges have been the usual group tasks that require a certain level of commitment from each member. And, as any other technology, the wiki platform poses some challenges e.g. no synchronous communication, managing editing online etc. Overall, the task gives students a good feel for the positives and challenges of such collaboration and helps develop their online editing and publishing skills.

Example 2: Undergraduate course in Pharmacy Practice

Students are required to produce a promotional website to develop an awareness of a particular disease and its burden on the sufferer, their family and society at large. It integrates information literacy with other important skills and attributes of a Pharmacist e.g. empathy, holistic approach to patient management etc. The exercise is carefully scaffolded as a WebQuest. All the instructions and steps for producing the website are provided online, including information on group work, searching and validating information on the web, using medicines information and presentation skills. Since students use CourseBuilder student pages for the websites, they are given ‘how to’ guides and continuous support through the process. The output has been of a very high quality and students have enjoyed this task. There are usual complaints on some aspects of collaboration that we are trying to address with individual reports on credible websites using the CRAAP test. Overall, this assignment encourages students to critically analyse the information available on the web and then be able to successfully use these in web publishing. The latter requires careful consideration of copyright and proper referencing.

References

Kennedy, G., Dalgarno, B., Gray, K., Judd, T., Waycott, J., Bennett, S., Maton, K., Krause, K.L., Bishop, A., Chang, R. & Churchward A. (2007). The net generation are not big users of Web 2.0 technologies: Preliminary findings. In ICT: Providing choices for learners and learning. Proceedings ascilite Singapore. 
http://www.ascilite.org.au/conferences/singapore07/procs/kennedy.pdf  
Prensky, M. (2001). Digital natives, digital immigrants. On the Horizon, 9(5).